Four Tips to Accelerate your ServiceNow integration using Actian PointConnect

Deploying new applications is a fact of life in business. But oftentimes, a seemingly simple integration can quickly become more complex and costly than anticipated.

If you are one of the thousands of organizations planning to use, or already using, ServiceNow, you’ll want to keep in mind a few things to make your investment as successful as possible. We can all likely agree that an effective integration strategy is critical, especially in the case of an application like ServiceNow, which needs to be connected to other applications and data to provide maximum value. Here are four tips to consider:

Jumpstart your integration using pre-built templates. Instead of building your integration from scratch, why not take advantage of the domain knowledge collected from decades of integration experience? Actian PointConnect includes pre-built workflow templates that expedite mapping and data transformations between two specific applications. For instance, PointConnect templates map commonly-used fields across ServiceNow Incident Management and Salesforce Case, so you can accelerate your integration and immediately start realizing value from the applications. Just use the drag-and-drop graphical user interface to customize the integration, if needed. In our experience, PointConnect cuts the average time and cost to implement by 50%, and there’s minimal ongoing maintenance.

Think of the hidden costs when considering hand coding. ServiceNow provides an open API for connectivity to enable hand coding. While hand coding could mean a short start time, no new development tools and simple deployment, as integration requirements grow, so do the problems associated with custom code. It can quickly raise issues such as inability to reuse, and problems related to maintenance, scalability and extensibility. The result: what started as a simple project can become far more complex and costly than initially expected.

Designing and developing the integration is the easy part. Maintaining it and ensuring its scalability is a long-term project. Because most integration designs are static in nature, they don’t serve fluid business processes and complex work flows that constantly change and expand over time. Custom integrations can become obsolete or nearly impossible to re-engineer as business needs change. This is because in many cases, the most challenging aspect of data integration is not in the initial design and development of an integration project, but rather the maintenance required to ensure scalability and continued dynamism as business needs evolve over time.

PointConnect alters the configuration on the fly to accommodate any changes to business processes and APIs. It helps you to maintain your integration with proactive monitoring, error handling and scalability.

Focus on the use case, not the integration. The reason you deploy new technology is to remedy a business problem, and often the sooner the better. PointConnect provides a wide variety of easy-to-configure components that simplify connecting to the ServiceNow APIs, extracting relevant data and its metadata, and maintaining the integration after it has completed. This means you can focus solely on implementing the business processes served by the use case instead of spending time coding and maintaining the integration.

Learn more

To find out more about how PointConnect can deliver a faster, cost-effective way to do integrations, click here or watch the video of the ServiceNow and Salesforce integration in action. And keep in mind that PointConnect comes with a 90-day success plan that incorporates both integration and onboarding.

About Dahye Huh

Dahye Huh is the Director of Content Marketing for Actian. Dahye has over a decade of software engineering and product marketing experience in big data technologies. Prior to Actian, Dahye worked at Microsoft, Hewlett Packard and Guavus.